Connectria Hosting Unveils an IBM i Cloud
by Alex Woodie

Connectria Hosting, a longtime provider of IBM i server outsourcing services for some very big names, last week announced that it's making the leap to hosting public and private IBM i clouds. By early June, the St. Louis, Missouri-based company expects its first IBM i cloud offering, dubbed the Silver Cloud, to be ready for new clients, with rates starting at $495 for one/tenth of a processor on a brand-spanking new Power Systems Model 770 running IBM i 6.1 or 7.1. READ MORE >

Help/Systems Widens the Robot's Reach
by Alex Woodie

IBM i shops that use more than one Help/Systems tool to automate data center operations can now view the status of multiple Help/Systems products from a single screen, called the Product Metrics Dashboard, which shipped last month with Robot/NETWORK version 11. The company also unveiled a new release of its cross-platform job scheduler, Robot/SCHEDULE Enterprise, that can control batch jobs running on Microsoft SQL Server. READ MORE >

ManageEngine Pushes the Systems Management Envelope
by Alex Woodie

If you're in the market for systems management software, but can't swallow the big license fees and long implementation times of the Big 4, you might want to check out ManageEngine, which purports to offer 80 percent of the functionality of its larger competitors at about 20 percent of the cost. But one functional area where ManageEngine may have an advantage is in the adoption of new technology, such as social media and mobile computing, which ManageEngine is embedding into its products. READ MORE >

Hubspan Sees Growth in Cloud-Based Application Integration
by Alex Woodie

Application integration is one of those IT disciplines that is begging for simplification. Since the early days of networked business computing, the task of keeping data flowing between applications has been a big pain in the IT department--and a giant source of revenue for service providers. It's also an area that business process service provider Hubspan sees as a big opportunity to address with its cloud-based integration offering. READ MORE >